Sunday, January 3, 2010

As promised: Canada oh Canada

One good thing about Canada is, there is only 13 demographic units to enter data for.Of course, I am still looking for good sources of data, and for good sources of interesting data. Those lacking, I just looked at what wikipedia could tell me, and decided to look to see if gdp per capita and land area were correlated:There does seem to be some sort of trend here, or more than one. Also, the two big outliers are both very small territories. So I don't know. Also, yesterday I promised that we would get a plot that looked like a dragon's head. And of course this doesn't look like a dragon's head, but it does look somewhat like a pair of pliers. Or, as they say in Canada: "spanners".

Spanners are wrenches. And I continue to think that some of your plots might be even more interesting in three dimensions. Instead of Per Capita GDP vs. Land Mass, I'd be interested in seeing GDP vs. Land Mass vs. Population Density. I guess you could divide it up into three different plots (LM vs. GDP, GDP vs. PD and PD vs. LM), but I think one succinct 3d plot could allow us to look for other correlations.

For example, QC and some un-named province on the left have similar per-capita GDP but very different land masses. Could it be that both have similar number of people per square mile?

Of course, now that I think of it it'd be nice to look at other variables. Overall population density wouldn't necessarily mean anything, because a large province with a few big cities might have the same overall density as a little one with lots of towns and hamlets. For this one, especially considering a large portion of GDP probably comes from oil (i.e. Alberta's shale fields), it might be interesting to map against *uninhabited* land mass, or something like that.